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It comes in two tiers, and these are the prices if you live in the US.

But day one didn't go smoothly. The stream was constantly dropping and buffering.

When it was working, the picture quality was pretty good.

Like everyone else I think the Halo device (the bit that looks like a flip flop in front of the driver) is hideously ugly. But I do like the way F1 is overlaying graphics on top of it now.

A replay from Valteri Bottas' car.

At first I thought there was no audio at all for the onboards, but there is.

More onboard audio options.

Even replaying a session after the fact saw buffering issues.

The landing page for this weekend's Grand Prix.

I'm not sure why Azerbaijan is listed as the next Grand Prix, given that it was two weekends ago.

The archived videos from 2008.

And the same page for 2017. Some of these are full race replays, others are just highlights.

The oldest race in the archives is also a classic! The 1998 Belgian Grand Prix.

This week, Formula 1's long-anticipated Internet streaming service went live just ahead of the Spanish Grand Prix. The introduction of its own online stream was a huge priority for Liberty Media, the sport's owner, which is trying to bring the 21st century to a series that until now had stoutly ignored the Internet. This new stream probably represents the biggest fan-facing change Liberty has made since buying F1's commercial rights from a vulture fund, and it's an offering many of us have been crying out for. Many other racing series have been live-streaming their races for some time now. But I'm not going to sugar coat it—this new F1 viewing option seems really quite mediocre, particularly considering the cost.

You pays your money...

There are actually two different subscription levels on offer. F1 TV Pro—$11.99 per month here in the US—gets you the races as well as all the other track sessions live and on-demand after the fact, along with all 20 cars' onboard feeds, unedited team radio broadcasts, an archive of past F1 races, documentaries, live timing, and a driver tracking map. F1 TV Access—just $2.99 in the US—is a little more basic. You still get the archives, documentaries, timing, scoring, and some radio feeds, but this tier only offers replays of each session.

The first hint of trouble appeared as I went to sign up his morning in time for the second Free Practice session for this weekend's race. I dutifully purchased a year's pass for F1 TV Pro, then spent some time getting site errors every time I tried to change my password. Figuring it could be an issue with Chrome I switched to Safari, but I saw more of the same. Eh, who needs a 25-character password anyway?

...and you watch the buffering screen

Once squared away, I fired up the stream and settled back to enjoy. Instantly, a mystery was resolved. I'd been wondering exactly who F1 was going to get to provide commentary, and the answer is David Croft, Martin Brundle, and the rest of the team from the UK's Sky Sports. Yes, that's the same bunch you now hear on ESPN calling the races. Additionally there are audio feeds in French, German, Spanish, as well as one with no talking soundtracked with just car sounds. Along the right hand side of the page is a list of all the drivers participating in the session. Click one of their names, and it brings up their onboard feed. At first it appeared as if these came with no audio at all, although that just turned out to be the default setting set to "Team Audio"—if the team isn't talking to the driver, there's nothing to hear. Thankfully you can change the audio for each onboard to the same selection as the main feed.

What I couldn't find anywhere was the live timing and scoring, which actually lives in a different section of the F1 webpage. There's nary a link on the TV section to help you find it. But such UX issues are slight compared to the bigger problem: the actual delivery of the stream. There was constant buffering, stuttering, and the occasional instance of the stream randomly rewinding itself back in time. The experience quickly became frustrating. And when you consider that the Friday practice sessions probably draw a fraction of the audience that will log on for qualifying on Saturday and the race on Sunday, it's a little bit worrying.

Encouragingly, Formula 1 knows it has a bit of a problem. The team took to Twitter to let the world know it's working on a fix:

2/2 We’ve had a few teething problems with the service as can be the case with any product launch, but our engineers are in the pit looking under the hood to fix this as soon as possible

With the service as is, it's not all bad, however. The archival content is great to have, and that currently goes back as far as the 1998 Belgian Grand Prix. But whether it's worth paying $99.99 for a year's access is another question.

If you have access to ESPN, I'm honestly not sure it is. You get the same video feed of the race with the same commentary team, and my experience of ESPN's stream quality to our Apple TVs has been pretty darn good. And if you still want access to the archived videos, all that stuff is available in the much cheaper F1 TV Access tier.

Does anyone /not/ think the service will be improved over time? It's the first public rollout, of course there will be problems. ESPN's service wasn't 100% perfect on day one release either.

Yeah, it will and they've been pretty responsive already on various forums. In fact I believe they now have an official presence on the Reddit F1 subreddit. They also link directly to it from their F1FanVoice site.

And people have been noticing they're backfilling the archives since it went live a day or so ago.

At the moment, their FAQ says you can only do one stream at a time, so watching the live feed alongside an onboard camera is probably out. You can probably switch on the ESPN feed and use the F1TV site for the onboard, but it'll likely be out of sync.

I heard inklings about PIP being available on the site. Any truth to that?

Does anyone /not/ think the service will be improved over time? It's the first public rollout, of course there will be problems. ESPN's service wasn't 100% perfect on day one release either.

But the tech is a solved problem! Everyone streams live sports, and this same exact content is competently streamed by ESPN. Of course it isn't the end of the world but people paid for this, they deserve better.

Does anyone /not/ think the service will be improved over time? It's the first public rollout, of course there will be problems. ESPN's service wasn't 100% perfect on day one release either.

Yes, it should improve, but the point is that there is nothing really special about what they are doing here and the tech and solutions are really mature, so they should have not had these kind of teething problems especially on such a light day.

...and the F1 TV Pro service has been rolled out globally, with the exception of several countries that, for whatever reason, don't make the cut. And for some reason, Canada's on the "Do-not-offer" list. Is yours? Find out here: https://f1tv.formula1.com/en/content-schedule

Does anyone /not/ think the service will be improved over time? It's the first public rollout, of course there will be problems. ESPN's service wasn't 100% perfect on day one release either.

Of course they will fix it, the question is "why is this still a problem"?

ESPN wasnt 100%, but they fixed all their problems. Streaming tech has also come a long way in the short time since ESPN live-streaming started. So why did F1 have such issues? Did they not learn ANYTHING?

This is just like how when a game comes out and the servers dont work due to load. WE have long learned that load will be high, but companies dont seem willing to learn from their own or other's failures. At this point it reeks of laziness.

I haven't watched the live feed yet, but one bizarre thing in the 2018 replays I've tried is there's no Multiaudio mix yet. So you can listen to the English commentary feed or you can listen to the cars but you can't listen to both!

This article seems a little harsh. I'm sure the service will rapidly improve.

If this was late March and the service had just launched in time for the Australian Grand Prix, I'd be a lot more forgiving. But it was delayed for the first four races so Liberty could stress test the system. I guess they didn't stress test it very hard.

One major question I have: as I never watch live, can you use this to watch a race later without seeing results or other headlines first? Is there a delay from when an event happens to when you can watch later?

Also, if I don't choose an onboard camera and just passively watch the main feed with commentary, will it still show onboards, replays, etc as on the Sky TV coverage?

One major question I have: as I never watch live, can you use this to watch a race later without seeing results or other headlines first? Is there a delay from when an event happens to when you can watch later?

I think you can't start a session from the beginning if it's midway through. I know the F1 iOS app has a setting for no spoilers, I don't see an equivalent on the F1 TV webpage though.

Quote:

Also, if I don't choose an onboard camera and just passively watch the main feed with commentary, will it still show onboards, replays, etc as on the Sky TV coverage?

Does anyone /not/ think the service will be improved over time? It's the first public rollout, of course there will be problems. ESPN's service wasn't 100% perfect on day one release either.

I think the problem is less that they had technical issues than it is that they went with this idiocy in the first place as a PPV/subscription thing.

As with ANY sport, you have two different kinds of audience: Casual and "fans". The casual group ALWAYS outnumbers the "fans", and, depending on the sport, can far and away outnumber them.

Fans is defined as people who will reliably and consistently spend money to watch individual instances of a sport (games, races, tournaments, matches, etc.). Casual viewers will not. A hell of a lot of people who call themselves "fans" are actually casual viewers mostly because none of them spend money out of pocket to watch sports, or do it only on very rare occasions.

Once upon a time, sports broadcasts and such relied on ad money from product identification (in racing, in particular) and televised ads. Then along came the Internet, and the sports owners got greedy, realizing they can burn both the fans and the advertisers, by pushing ads in pay per view.

That pretty much cuts off the casual viewers of sports entirely. It also bankrupts a lot of the "fans" who, while willing to spend the extra money, lack the income to do that. As it turns out this generates less revenue than simply streaming it with ads embedded as before, because then the casual viewer will be exposed to the ads and advertisers get more bang for the buck. That means ad revenue can far outstrip the income generated by PPV/subscription stuff.

As it happens, one must either have "fans" with exceptionally deep pockets to support all of the sports that demand cash payment to view it, or one caters to the casual viewer and earns revenue from ads. The former is a great way to turn your sport into a foot note in sports history. The latter is a much more viable approach, given that it's basically worked as long as television has been around.

What PPV/subscriptions fail to do that simply streaming with ads does is expose NEW people to the sport. If a sport is locked behind a paywall of some kind, how the hell is someone supposed to get interested in spending money on something they've never seen?

Short-term focus on profits will kill a lot of sports unless the owners wise up and realize that "free" is very relative when it comes to viewing, and that it's better to have a whole lot of people watching the sport for "free" (with ads) than it is to limit who can watch it strictly to those who give enough major shits about it to pony up the cash to see it.

For now, they haven't gotten that message. Give it a couple of years, and I expect it'll dawn on them that they've done a Really Stupid Thing and roll back the paywall.

I swear... every time there is a live launch of something it fucks up... you'd think they could look at the mistakes of others. But nope! We have to reinvent every time! It is like Musk with the factory. You don't need a super-robotic Hal to tighten a lug!

...and the F1 TV Pro service has been rolled out globally, with the exception of several countries that, for whatever reason, don't make the cut. And for some reason, Canada's on the "Do-not-offer" list. Is yours? Find out here: https://f1tv.formula1.com/en/content-schedule

Does anyone /not/ think the service will be improved over time? It's the first public rollout, of course there will be problems. ESPN's service wasn't 100% perfect on day one release either.

People who are overly negative and don't want to understand things will say they won't improve it. They're also the ones who typically say things like "why didn't they do any testing" or "why don't they just add more servers" with no willingness to understand how it actually works.

Does anyone /not/ think the service will be improved over time? It's the first public rollout, of course there will be problems. ESPN's service wasn't 100% perfect on day one release either.

Just give up and put your shit on YouTube. These are problems that have been solved. There's no reason for everyone and his brother to keep reinventing this wheel.

Youtube TV just stopped streaming for me as I was reading this article. I wouldn't say all the problems have been solved. It also was essentially useless last night while Netflix and Hulu were streaming just fine.

Does anyone /not/ think the service will be improved over time? It's the first public rollout, of course there will be problems. ESPN's service wasn't 100% perfect on day one release either.

Just give up and put your shit on YouTube. These are problems that have been solved. There's no reason for everyone and his brother to keep reinventing this wheel.

YouTube has lousy terms of service. As someone else pointed out they could use MLBtv's expertise as they're the people that rescued HBOGo from the doldrums. Anyway, it won't take that long to improve but I'm not surprised its shit considering how insular F1 is.